Google extends datacentre support for EU cloud customers

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IaaS offering now supported on European infrastructure.

Google has introduced Europe-wide support for its Cloud Compute Engine as part of a number of updates to its Cloud Platform.

The internet giant announced that European clients can deploy their applications, data and virtual machines onto EU datacentres using the company’s App Engine, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL products. Customers will soon be able to deploy instances on its Compute Engine infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering too, according to Google.

Barak Regev, head of Google’s Cloud Platform for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), told Cloud Pro there have been two driving forces behind this expansion of support for the company’s European datacentres.

“The first is performance ... [if all users and contributors are based in the EU], there will be lower the latency and increase performance [if the data centre is also in the EU] and that is the reason that many of our enterprise customers are asking for EU location,” Regev said.

“The second point is compliance – it is the combination of us providing a full contract with us giving them safe harbour compliance and all the checks and balances they need to feel safe that Google is the data processor, but they own the data,” he added.

The organisation has also launched a number of new features, including Durable Reduced Availability (DRA) storage, which offers storage with a slightly lower SLA than the standard storage offering but for approximately two-thirds of the price.

A further update is object versioning, which keeps a record of old versions of customers’ data.

“A very common challenge database and IT administrators have is ... that human beings do make mistakes sometimes and a lot of companies spend a lot of time and effort in trying to protect against accidental deletion or overwriting of data, either by human mistake or application error,” Regev explained.

“With the introduction of object versioning, you can create a snapshot of your object to protect you against that wrongful deleting or overwriting data,” he concluded.

The standard price of storage has also been reduced by approximately one third, from 12 cents (seven pence) per gigabyte to 9.5 cents (6 pence) at entry level.